Good health is the basics done consistently
My approach to staying strong, active and full of life. Boring, simple, and not easy.
Being in good health comes down to doing the basics right and doing them consistently. That is the whole of it. It is boring and it is simple, and it is not easy. Those two things sit together more often than we like to admit. The knowledge is not the hard part. The showing up, week after week, year after year, when nothing dramatic is happening and no one is watching, that is the hard part.
Over the last few years I have been working on improving my vitality. I use the word vitality rather than health because it describes what I am actually after. Health can mean the mere absence of illness, a flat line where nothing is wrong. Vitality is the state of being strong, active and full of life. That feels like a worthier goal, and one I would wish on anyone.
Like most people, my reasons are part health and part vanity. I will not pretend otherwise. The idea of getting old and decrepit scares me. I can make my peace with the old part. The decrepit part I would rather resist for as long as I can. Underneath it all sits a simple thought that has become my whole philosophy on this: you get one body to carry you through life, so you may as well maintain it as well as you can while you have it.
The good news is that maintaining vitality is not complicated or expensive. It does not require the latest technology, a premium gym subscription, a cabinet full of supplements or hours you do not have. Most of what works is cheap, unglamorous and available to anyone willing to keep showing up. What follows is what I have settled on. None of it is clever. All of it is boring. That, I have come to think, is rather the point.
Get lean
Carrying less fat is the single change that improves almost everything else: how you look, how you move, and how your metabolism handles fuel. I aim to keep my body fat in the low teens, around 13 percent, while holding on to as much muscle as I can.
The point is not to be as light as possible. It is to carry enough muscle to resist the decline that comes with age while staying light enough to move well and stay metabolically healthy. Lean but strong. Not skinny, not bulky.
I started at around 20 percent body fat, and bringing it down to 13 meant sitting in a calorie deficit for about six months. That was the hard part, the long, patient, slightly hungry stretch where progress is too slow to feel from one day to the next. Maintaining it, once I was there, has been easy. Getting to a good place costs more than staying in one.
Eat mostly whole foods
I treat nutrition as a long-term operating system, not a diet I go on and come off. The base is minimally processed, nutrient-dense food, with protein at every meal and plenty of fibre and plants.
I do not demonise the odd processed thing, and I do not track every macro. The rule is simple: get the pattern right most of the time and it takes care of body composition, energy and long-term health without dominating my attention. Food should support life, not become the project.
In practice that means chicken, mince, salmon, avocado, potato, sweet potato, vegetables, rice, Greek yoghurt, berries, apples, bananas, nuts, seeds and olive oil. More or less the Mediterranean diet, which people have thrived on for a very long time without an app to tell them how.
Sleep and rest
Sleep is the input that restores everything else, so I treat it as foundational rather than optional. Aiming for seven-plus hours a night does more for recovery, hormones and appetite than any supplement I could buy.
Rest matters as much as training. Pushing hard without recovering does not build vitality, it drains it. I have learned the hard way that when sleep slips, that is the signal to back off, not to push through. The body keeps a fair set of accounts, and it collects.
I will be honest here: this is the one I still struggle with. Despite trying various ways to fix it, good sleep remains the piece that most often lets me down. I have made my peace with the fact that some of these basics never fully stop being work.
Lift weights
Resistance training is how you keep the muscle and strength that ageing quietly takes away. A couple of sessions a week covering the main movements is enough. You do not need an elaborate programme or a fancy gym.
The aim is to train to maintain vibrancy, not to chase a personal best. Consistency at a sustainable intensity over years beats going hard for a few weeks and then crashing. I would rather do the modest thing for a decade than the heroic thing for a month.
The benefits go well beyond how you look. Lifting improves body composition, bone density and insulin sensitivity, on top of the everyday strength that keeps you capable and independent as you age. That last part is the one I think about most.
Do steady state cardio
Steady state cardio, or Zone 2, is easy aerobic work done at a conversational pace, the kind where you can still hold a full sentence without gasping. Running, cycling, rowing or a brisk incline walk all count.
It builds the aerobic base that makes everything else sustainable, and it is the least glamorous but most reliable thing you can do for your heart and metabolism. Low effort, high return, done regularly. Nobody will be impressed that you did it. Your future self will be glad you did.
Go all out occasionally
Every so often you need to genuinely redline: short, hard intervals at close to maximum effort. This is what maintains VO2 max, which is about the strongest single predictor we have of how long you will live.
It does not take much. Once a fortnight is plenty. Think of it as a ceiling to touch occasionally, not a floor to grind against. More of it is not better. Push hard here so you can stay easy everywhere else.
Monitor your heart
You cannot manage what you do not measure, so I keep an eye on a few simple heart metrics over time. Resting heart rate, blood pressure and heart rate variability are cheap or free to track, and they act as an early warning system, both for cardiovascular risk and for whether I am recovering properly.
Trends matter more than any single reading. A bad number on a bad morning means little. A number drifting the wrong way over weeks means something, and it usually tells me before I feel it.
Get blood tested periodically
A blood test once or twice a year turns guesswork into data. The markers I care most about are the ones tied to long-term cardiovascular risk, things like ApoB and LDL cholesterol, alongside a broader panel covering hormones, inflammation and general health.
The value is catching drift early, while it is still cheap and easy to correct, rather than finding out decades later when the damage is done. Test, act on what it shows, retest.
Getting tested after putting all of the above into practice did two things for me. It showed me where I had improved, with blood pressure, triglycerides and inflammation markers all sitting in a healthy range. And it showed me exactly where I still had work to do, like bringing my ApoB down. Both are useful. Praise on its own is comfortable and teaches you nothing.
The boring truth
None of this is a secret. You have heard most of it before, probably many times, which is rather the problem. We keep looking for a better answer than the one we already have, because the real answer is unglamorous and asks for patience rather than intensity.
There is no version of this you complete. There is no finish line where you have won at health and can stop. There is only the practice, repeated, on the good days and the flat ones. That is the part no supplement or subscription can do for you.
But it compounds. Do the basics, badly at first and then a little better, for long enough, and one day you notice you are stronger, steadier and more alive than you were, without any single moment of drama to point to. You get one body. This, as far as I can tell, is how you keep it worth living in.